Gallery

The Whore of Babylon William Blake

Between 1799 and 1810, Blake made a number of watercolour paintings of biblical subjects for his patron Thomas Butts. This intense work illustrates Revelation 17: 1–4. Closely following the King James Bible, it depicts the judgement of ‘the great whore … with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication’. She sits upon a scarlet-coloured beast with seven heads and ten horns, ‘decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication’. Blake identified Babylon with London and the heads of the monster are devouring the swarming ‘peoples of the earth’.

Witches' Sabbath Frans Francken II

This painting takes us into a witches’ kitchen with a coven assembled to prepare for the sabbath, while a raging fire viewed through the door is a reminder of the maleficia (evil deeds) that witches practise daily. A nude witch is flying up the chimney on the right with its shelf of skulls, cats and a lighted ‘hand of glory’. The two beautiful young witches in the foreground with their ruffs and rich clothes, concentrating on an incantation, could well be courtesans: the figure in a blue dress stirring the enormous cauldron behind them wears the three-pointed paper cap of a brothel keeper. Diabolical creatures from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder mingle here with the paraphernalia of necromancy.

The Weird Sisters from Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' After Henry Fuseli (1741-1825); mezzotint by John Raphael Smith (1751-1812)

Fuseli produced many versions of this powerfully simplified image illustrating Act I, Scene iii, when Macbeth first encounters the three witches on the heath, and Banquo exclaims:

So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth

… you should be women,

And yet your beards forbid me to interpret

That you are so.

Fuseli’s witches are hooded in a manner that influenced many other artists including caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Long attracted to Shakespeare, Fuseli was a co-instigator of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Raphael Smith made prints after the original paintings for circulation.

The Magic Circle John William Waterhouse

The entranced witch staring into a vertical spume of smoke does not look at her right arm, incising a magic circle that hisses with white light on the ground. Her eyes are obscured by her low fringe of pitch-black hair, and she wears an ouroboros around her neck. Flowering herbs are fixed to her waist and helmeted Greek warriors are embroidered on her skirt. The only active agents in the curiously empty picture are black crows, two of which perch dangerously on the glowing brazier. The witch appears to be alone in a desert plain, but there may be an ominous creature at the back left, next to a landing crow, as well as some squatting witches in front of a cave on the right.

from Out of the Woods, Untitled (Encryption) 1:5 Kiki Smith

The five prints in this series depict Smith dressed as a witch in a black cape, long skirt and heavy boots, posed against a black background. The images have been digitally modified so that her head is enlarged and her claw-like hands are reduced in size. The text under each image relates to the five senses: this image reads ‘On still moonlight a witch alone haunts the dark. She’s been touched.’ The prints relate to a silent film, The Wind, 1928, starring American actress Lilian Gish. Smith, a feminist sculptor, formidable draughtsperson and printmaker, has long been interested in the subject of the witch. She has memorably said: ‘I have always thought of myself as a crone.’

Three Heads: The Witches of Macbeth John Runciman

John Runciman, Alexander’s younger brother, died of consumption in Italy a year after they both arrived to study in Rome, where they joined the vibrant international group of artists associated with Fuseli. The wonderful gestural freedom of line in this assemblage of three hairless heads with the pointed ears of Satyrs has meant that for years this image was not firmly associated with the three Weird Sisters of Macbeth, although Runciman was illustrating scenes from Shakespeare in the 1760s. Although witch hags generally have wild hair entwined with snakes, they are often masculine in appearance, or sexually indeterminate. What adds potency to this group is the skilful suggestion of a cunning conspiracy being ‘cooked up’ by the evil trinity.

L'Appel de la Nuit [The Call of the Night] Paul Delvaux

Delvaux, a maker of surreal dream images whose classically drawn nude women in mysterious settings are erotic and troubling, knew the work of his fellow Belgian artist, the Symbolist Félicien Rops (1833-1898). Rops’s obsession with death, sin and pollution was expressed in prints of women as evil predators. Delvaux produced far more benign images; nevertheless, this painting of ‘women of the night’ has ambivalent layers of meaning. The threatening aspect of the women’s sexuality is emphasised by the desolate landscape which they inhabit: this is the landscape of death as well as sex. The hair of two of the figures has metamorphosed into ivy, which has rooted itself in the earth and prevents the figures from escaping: they are held, motionless, as objects of our gaze.